SAN FRANCISCO, April 23 - During Amazon's annual review season now under way, the company is testing a change to job titles at two of its home security businesses that will remove many conventional white-collar labels. In the pilot, hundreds of workers who oversee product at Ring and Blink will have their existing titles replaced. The new, simplified designation for those roles will be "builder," and their supervisors will be called "builder leaders."
The shift is being overseen by the executive currently holding the title chief product officer, who explained the thinking behind the change in an internal memo circulated this month. In that memo, he said the organization intends to be "transparent and open to change" and announced a move to "a single job family: Builder." The memo stated that success as a Builder will be measured by one question - "what is the scope and magnitude of the customer value you create?" The company has confirmed the change internally.
Ring and Blink produce internet-connected doorbells and cameras used for home monitoring. The new label - builder - has become a broader shorthand in Silicon Valley for individuals who can independently drive projects that previously required larger teams, often by leveraging new technologies such as AI. The memo referenced the aspiration to create an organization more suited to that model.
Other technology companies have experimented with related naming conventions and role structures. One social platform has piloted the term "AI builder" for some functions, while a payments firm has moved some managers to the label "player-coach." Amazon's CEO has been pursuing a wider effort to pare back bureaucratic layers within the company, including establishing an internal channel for employees to call out excessive process.
Inside the Ring and Blink units, reactions have been mixed. Workers in the unit reported concerns that eliminating established prefixes such as "senior" and "lead" could muddy the traditional path to promotion and complicate the mechanisms that determine pay increases. Amazon maintains strict pay bands and equity allocations that are tied to performance and employee levels, and employees worry that removing conventional levels could affect those systems.
Others who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters said they feared this approach might expand beyond Ring and Blink to a companywide rollout. Amazon responded to those concerns by saying compensation, growth, and promotion paths will remain unchanged. A company spokesperson said the title change is intended to foster a culture of experimentation and to help the units deliver for customers more efficiently.
The memo also made clear that the new structure is meant to be iterative - anyone, the memo said, can propose modifications to the organizational design, and approaches that prove ineffective will be reversed. The executive who authored the memo will also see his own title altered in the change, with the spokesperson indicating his role could be retitled to "builder lead."
Observers also recalled a previous experiment with removing hierarchy at an Amazon-owned shoe retailer, which attempted to operate without conventional managerial layers under a system called "holacracy." That earlier effort was later abandoned. The current pilot at Ring and Blink is narrower in scope and explicitly tied to product roles and customer-value metrics.
Context and implications
The pilot at Ring and Blink highlights how large technology employers are rethinking role definitions in product organizations. By simplifying job families and focusing on customer-value metrics, the initiative aims to accelerate decision-making and reduce process overhead. At the same time, the change raises questions for employees about clarity of career progression and the operation of long-established compensation frameworks.